this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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How about:
Stick them somewhere out of the way, like the dark side of the Moon.
Use multiple space telescopes and build a composite image.
You mean stick the Hubble on the dark side of the moon? That’s a little difficult.
The small satellites swarming everywhere can’t be stuck out of the way. They’re communications satellites. They need to be close by to reduce latency.
Space telescopes in general. Somewhere that isn't LEO; I grabbed that as an example because I recall it being needed for...IIRC it was radiotelescopes, to avoid communications chatter. Might not be ideal for optical telescopes.
The two biggest problems with observatories on the far side of the moon are being limited to only half of space (the same as planetary observatories) and the cost to build it. You can mitigate the first by having observatories on opposite edges of the far side, but that also costs twice as much as building one.
There's also the issue with communicating with the satellite. Hard to do that with thousands of kilometers of rock in the way
And yet, I can use satellites to communicate on the other side of the world. I have a suspicion the same system would work for this.
It would require multiple additional satellites orbiting the Moon.
So the only problem is money. This isn't an engineering issue, we've done this thousands of times. Unlike almost every other aspect of building a radio or optical observatory on the moon.
Ze dak side of ze moon!